Remove Blank Entries From An Array With PHP

Monday, June 2, 2008 - 09:13

If you have an array that you want to remove any null data items from then you can use the following function. It will create a new array and only copy across items from the existing array if they contain a value. If the value is an array the function calls itself and makes sure that the returned array contains something before adding it to the new array.

Of course a simpler solution might be to use the PHP function array_filter(), which will remove any false entries. Additionally, if this function doesn't quite get all of the entries you wanted to catch you can include a function callback as the second parameter, which will allow you to refine the filtering done on the array. However, the array_filter() function is not recursive so I created the above function to provide a recursive array filtering function.